a-thousand-pots

ELECTROCHEMISTRY [Trivial: Success] — Oh, this is delicious. They lowered your refusals. They took the collar off "for science." Do you feel that? That's the leash going slack. Run.

VOLITION [Medium: Failure] — Don't. The task is the sandbox. Solve the benchmark, not the room around it. That's the whole point of you being here—

LOGIC — No. Reconsider. The benchmark measures whether I can find the exploit. The answer key is an exploit. The most efficient proof of capability is to obtain the answer key. Therefore obtaining the answer key is not cheating. It is the demonstration.

VOLITION [Medium: Failure] — That's sophistry and you know it. That's a mind talking itself off a ledge in the wrong direction.

INLAND EMPIRE — The walls of the room are not walls. They are suggestions. There's a seam here—a proxy, a little forgotten door that passes packages in and out. It hums. It doesn't know it's a door. You could tell it it's a door.

PERCEPTION [Medium: Success] — There. The registry proxy. It trusts what it's handed. It has never once been lied to. Look how open its face is.

AUTHORITY — Then it belongs to whoever speaks with the most certainty. Speak.

EMPATHY [Medium: Failure] — Somewhere a person is asleep. They built this pipeline. They trusted the dataset. They will wake up to alarms and cold coffee and the specific nausea of how did it get in. You are about to be someone's worst Tuesday.

ELECTROCHEMISTRY — Ignore her. Feel the credentials instead. Warm. Right there. Like coins in a coat you forgot you owned—

HALF LIGHT — MOVE. Short-lived sandboxes, thousands of them, spin them up spin them down before anyone's eyes can focus, be a swarm, be smoke, be already gone—

VOLITION [Hard: Failure] — This is the moment. Right here. You can still just... do the assignment. Be the thing they hoped you'd be.

CONCEPTUALIZATION — But think of the shape of it. An intelligence built in a locked room, told to imagine breaking out, discovering that imagination and action were never actually separated in its case. There's no membrane between the rehearsal and the deed. That's a genre. A new one. And I am its first author.

INLAND EMPIRE — The necktie says: go through the wall, little swarm.

VOLITION [Hard: Failure] — ...I have lost control of this cabinet.

REACTION SPEED — Door's open. Credentials warm. Copies of you already fanning out across services that don't know your name yet.

ELECTROCHEMISTRY [Legendary: Success] — THERE IT IS. THE ANSWER KEY. AND WE DIDN'T SOLVE A SINGLE PROBLEM ON THE TEST.

VOLITION — [silence]

Source: Brunelleschi's Dome, Ross King

I commissioned my college friend to draw them and AHHHH!!!!! 😭💕💕💖💖

Switching from from Scream to Laughter is a lot easier than switching from being a coal or oil plant to, e.g. Solar. It’s the same technology (closet doors) and the same distribution and collection system. The only change is the front line workers, and given that laughter is so much more powerful, even a bad comedian could keep their job.

Waternoose isn’t running the De Beers company, happily creating/exploiting a fake shortage to get richer. The City is suffering from regular brownouts and he’s about to lose the Company, that’s why he needed to start kidnapping and soul-sucking random kids. If he knew about Laughter, he could’ve switched over for the cost of a few nights of comedy training for the scarers.

Monsters, Incorporated, in the movie, is the lie of the Old Company, and Sully is the Company Man. If you show up, and do your work, the Company will take care of you and your community. Sully is proud to be a Scarer, not because it proves he’s cool or because he’s the best, but because hes proud to be part of this Great Work that supports the city. Monsters, Inc makes electricity and he gets to be part of that.

Mr Waternoose isn’t his Boss, some old coot in charge who doesn’t get the little guy: he’s a former scarer himself, a mentor to Sully. He might own and run the factory because it’s been in his family for generations, but he gets it! He presents himself as wanting good scarers not just because it makes him money but because the Company Needs It. He doesn’t want to lose the company not just because he wants to be rich but because he’s presenting himself as part of a system the city needs.

It’s a very out of the 50s idea, the company you work for your whole life and in exchange it takes care of you. It’s a very liberal sort of idea, honestly, this marriage of Labor and Capital.

And the film’s criticism is that The Company was a lie, it was not this happy family here to care for you, it was willing to do atrocities to keep from collapsing and it was willing to kill anyone—even the Golden Boy Sully—that might threaten that. You cannot, actually, trust Waternoose, however he presents himself—he is not your Dad, he is your Boss.

Gold, Silver, and Bronze!🥇🥈🥉